Recent Posts

Follow Us

Tag Archives for champion

24 year-old Jamie Crane-Mauzy is a champion. She learned to ski when she was only one year old, being a profession in the sport was a solid childhood dream. In 2008, at age 16, she joined the United States Ski Team’s Elite Aerial Development Program.

Goals are meaningful to Crane-Mauzy. She says,

“If you take baby steps in the direction of your dream, you can accomplish whatever you want.”

However, in 2015 her skiing career ended when she crashed during a competition in Canada. The accident caused paralysis and a devastating brain injury causing a comma and severe memory loss. She lad to learn how to walk and talk again after her memory returned but Jamie remained positive a motivated throughout as she rebuilt her life. “I didn’t worry too much about the future or compare myself to the past” she says “I just set goals I could accomplish.

Jamie Crane-Mauzy has accomplished much, she is an elite woman of achievement.

As we celebrate Jamie, please send your nominations for a person to profile on Fantastic Friday. Make this day as FANTASTIC as you are.

You are fantastic! You make this world a better place by being stalwart and strong.

Honorable Cruz Reynoso

Cruz Reynoso is a fantastic human being. His fascinating life is being chronicled in a documentary, Sowing the Seeds of Justice. He is one of those rare individuals who are not only shaped by history, like other heroes has made an indelible make on history. This seminal documentary created by Abby Ginzberg, now showing on public broadcast stations, paints a portrait of Cruz Reynoso, a man who felt the sting of injustice as a child and later, as a lawyer, judge and teacher, fought for over five decades to eradicate discrimination and inequality for all.

Sowing the Seeds of Justice begins with Cruz Reynoso’s childhood where he was born into a Spanish-speaking farm worker family of eleven children. Sowing the Seeds of Justice tells about Justice Reynoso’s his struggle to be educated, leading to his graduation from Pomona College in 1953 and from UC Berkeley Law School in 1958. He then became the first Latino Director of California Rural Legal Assistance and later one of the first Latino law professors in the country beginning his academic career at the University of New Mexico Law School.

His ascent to the California Supreme Court was a singular achievement, when he was appointed by Governor Jerry Brown as the first Latino justice on that bench. Then in a heated recall campaign whose central issue was the death penalty, think Troy Davis and the state of Georgia, Reynoso and two other justices lost their seats. As Vice Chair on the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, he provided leadership in the only investigation of voting rights abuses in the 2000 election in Florida. Mr. Reynoso has received the country’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, for his lifelong devotion to public service and today at 78, he continues to teach law at UC Davis Law School and to actively participate in community organizations throughout the state of California.

“I think it’s good if you have a pattern of activity that works for you, and I’ve always felt that as long as God

provides a mind that works and a body that works, you’re better off being active.” ~Cruz Reynoso.

We all are champions. Cruz Reynoso is a champion whose legal advocacy makes Friday Fantastic.